March 29, 2003

He takes a stand on major urban issues, often against the state or even mainstream opinion. Arif Hasan is perhaps Pakistan’s best known architect at home and abroad, and for good reasons, writes Mukhtar Husain

Having known Arif Hasan closely for over twenty years, I knew he had trained as an architect, but given up a highly successful practice to immerse himself in the areas of technology and development, architectural and planning education, and incremental (low-cost) sanitation and housing based on action research. I also knew these had led to other social projects and, ultimately, to prolific writings about all his research and experiences in Pakistan and abroad.

I was keen to know and to understand the reasons behind this dramatic turn-around. “It was a series of chance encounters”, he replied in his soft, steady voice, across a white-top table piled with books, reports and papers, with a backdrop of bookshelves packed with more of the same.

“I grew up in the Intelligence School, amid poor refugees. I always felt guilty about being better off. It bothered me that our driver came to pick me up in a car.” Such were the beginnings of an intellectual quest, a journey of the mind that took him close to anarchist thinking as a young man.

He went to the Oxford Polytechnic School of Architecture in 1960. While there, he began reading on religion and philosophy. This influenced his thinking and outlook deeply. After studying in England for three years, he took a year off and went to Europe. He registered at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, but never really studied there.

He returned to Oxford, but did not like being there, and left to work in France and Spain and to travel. He returned to Pakistan in 1968. The first year back he travelled extensively, in Tharparkar, on the River Indus, and in the remote Northern Areas. He kept a diary, took photos...

“I obtained my licence to practise as an architect, thanks to Mr Ahmad Ali, then Chief Town Planner, Karachi Development Authority (KDA). I had hoped to sit for my RIBA exams, but never got around to it. Meanwhile, I got involved with designing a few houses, including Farooq Hasan’s house, which is how I got to design the Hasan Square apartments complex.” Interestingly, in 1983, Arif received the Best Building Award from the KDA for this project.

He has admired architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Geoffrey Bawa, and was torn in a conflict between working in the international style, in which he had been trained, with its distinct intellectual and technological bias, and the environmental paradigm dictating modesty, and losing oneself in the context. His own tendency has been to follow a process of dialectical thinking, emphasizing cause and effect rather than passion; reason rather than love.

“I do design a few houses still, for friends or old clients. However, I find it increasingly difficult to deal with them. With the trend towards ostentatious villas, I have lost respect for such clients, and can no longer relate to them, aesthetically or socially.”

With time, his work has become austere. He believes a building should be simple, cheap and climatically comfortable; it should function well; there should be a visible correlation between its interior and exterior.

‘So what did you get involved with?’ I asked.

“I started to get involved with land and housing issues. My first experience was when the Mohana fishermen whom I had befriended during my travels and who lives in boats along the banks of Manchar Lake near Sehwan Sharif approached me for help. They were being forced to move. As I got involved, I began to see this as an architectural and planning problem more than one of social organization.”

Some time later, in 1973-74 he was asked for help by the people of Sultanabad who were being moved to Baldia. He saw this as a land and housing issue. Although he had no prior training in such matters, nor was he aware of a methodology of intervention, he began to understand the forces behind the plight of the poor.

Through his friend Lutfur Rehman of the DJ Science College days, Arif continued to get involved in land-related problems in the inner-city affecting hawkers, shopkeepers and communities. Without recourse to professional guidelines, he assisted them with their struggle against eviction and dislocation.

Interestingly, he felt more comfortable working out solutions to such problems than designing houses for rich clients. He also noted that, in most developing countries, the poor built houses for themselves with little or no outside help, even though these are very basic shelters.

When the Metroville sites-and-services housing scheme was launched by the government in the mid-70s, Arif immediately recognized — and wrote vehemently about — the futility of the whole concept. He turned out to be right. Thus gradually, perhaps without realizing it himself, Arif Hasan was being remolded, from a society architect into a people’s architect and housing expert.

In 1975, Ghulam Kibria of the Appropriate Technology Development Organization, who had been reading Arif’s articles, asked him to become a consultant to his organization. Together Kibria and Arif tested out alternatives for low-cost houses. The 1977 floods in Karachi resulted in the need to rehabilitate a large number of affected people. Again this duo applied its collective wisdom, discussed, experimented and churned out solutions.

Arif enjoyed his association with Kibria and began to see the correlation of technology, economy and social relations to housing. He decided to dump his other clients for good.

“Every Sunday, for several years, I have walked around one or another area of the city for two or three hours, taken photos and documented my observations. Two or three weeks later, on a Saturday (a working day) I have then walked the same area again to understand how businesses and organizations function in the area e.g. Dhanmandi. Through this interaction I have understood the process and the actors of change. This has prompted me to write.”

In 1979, Arif was invited to teach at the Department of Architecture and Planning of the Dawood College of Engineering and Technology (DCET), Karachi. Thus began a very significant period of his professional career, during which he has worked with students and made them aware of the city’s squatter settlements, inner-city slums, informal interest groups and infrastructure and land issues, and also of the political, social and economic realities to which they are subservient.

A number of his former students, all admirers, are now in positions to influence these larger issues. He is a Visiting Professor at the NED University, Karachi, and is also teaching at the Department of Visual Studies, Karachi University.

In 1982, Kibria introduced Arif to Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan of the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP). The two men immediately saw eye to eye, and Arif became principal consultant to the OPP.

“Akhtar Hameed Khan taught me two important things,” says Arif. “To see the work I was doing, and the concepts I was promoting in the larger context of Pakistan and its development. Also that history has various interpretations — the only correct one is that which is ethical and moral.”

Arif came to believe that one cannot study history objectively if isolated from the larger historical context.

Dr. Khan had been developing the OPP for two years when Arif met him. Initially, his model of ‘uplift’ was rejected by the planners in Pakistan as well as by the UNCHS. The process of incremental development necessitated establishing new standards in engineering and planning, to obtain the optimal relationship between needs and resources. The sociological and institutional model was Dr Khan’s. Arif was to provide technical expertise and research inputs to it, write monographs and represent the OPP in various housing and development forums.

In 1983, the Commissioner of Karachi asked Kibria to do a socioeconomic study of the Lines Area Development Scheme, then under construction. Kibria and Arif worked on this together. Interestingly, they concluded that the scheme would fail as conceived — it would neither benefit its residents, nor would it benefit the city.

Arif thus gained further expertise through direct involvement. He started reading planning theories to try and make sense of what he was observing, and soon discovered that conventional theory did not correspond with the realities as seen in Karachi.

One thing led to another. In 1985, following the famine in Tharparkar, he received a flood of consultancy work through various UN and other international agencies and NGOs for both national and international projects related to social housing, urban issues, conservation and community development.

He also received invitations to teach and lecture abroad. By now he had acquired sufficient understanding of the issues, as distinct from conventional planning wisdom. An increasingly large number of professionals were beginning to share Arif’s outlook and viewpoint.

In 1987, he was invited as a celebrity speaker at the International Union of Architects (UIA) Congress in Brighton, UK. 1989 saw the establishment of the Urban Resource Centre (URC), initially at the Department of Architecture and Planning of the DCET, with the help of funds from the Swiss Development Corporation. Arif later set it up independently and remains its chairman to this day.

Similar centres are being replicated in Colombo, Kathmandu, Phnom Penh, etc., each dedicated to creating a more equitable relationship between urban society as a whole and the planning process. The Karachi URC is their model.

In 1989, Arif Hasan was asked by the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA) to be a member of the technical review team, to review projects in Egypt and Jordan. For the 1989-92 and the 1992-95 award cycles, Arif was a member of the AKAA steering committee. In 1990, he received the UN Year for the Shelterless Memorial Award, presented to him in Tokyo, Japan.

In 1998, Arif was a member of the AKAA master jury. The award has acknowledged Arif’s significant and lasting influence on its selection criteria; this has resulted in its moving away from its earlier, romantic outlook towards more socially relevant projects.

Housing, especially for the poor, is a three-way interaction between policies, plans and the people meant to benefit. According to Arif, since the ‘dalal’ (middle-man) in the private sector has been far more successful and effective than government agencies in delivering land for housing to the poor, why not give him a licence to develop agricultural land.

In 2000, Arif was declared by the Prince Claus Fund (Netherlands) an ‘Urban Hero’. In 2001, the Hilal-i-Imtiaz award for public service was conferred on him by the Government of Pakistan. He continues to work out of his modest office, surrounded by books.

Always on the move, frequently traveling abroad but mostly on short trips of up to two weeks’ duration, Arif has no use for a cell-phone. He nevertheless has his hand on the pulse of this city and of much of the country.

Designer, housing expert, teacher and researcher, Arif Hasan at age sixty is altogether much more than an architect. He has an astute understanding of the fuzzy domain between design, planning, socio-economic policy-making and governance, in the broadest sense of the word. He takes a stand on major urban issues, often against the state or even mainstream opinion. As such, Arif Hasan is perhaps Pakistan’s best known architect at home and abroad, for good reasons.

Moreover, through his sheer work, teaching and writing, he has reached the status of a third world master architect, who continues to contribute to creating a better urban life for all of us.